A driver who swerved "to avoid an octopus" before crashing has been arrested on suspicion of drug-driving.

Which brings to mind...

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

A driver who swerved "to avoid an octopus" before crashing has been arrested on suspicion of drug-driving.

Which brings to mind...

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

I saw that story! Of course, don't leave out the beautiful puns associated with it...

"It's good to see the police kraken down on drug driving"
"A case for the Cephala Plod."
"The car lost control and went into a squid?"

While waiting to start my own space game project, I've been helping others work on a total conversion of Empty Epsilon to the Mass Effect universe. EE is an open source starship bridge simulator similar to Artemis Bridge Simulator.http://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/

So far I've converted 50+ ship models to meet EE's loading requirements, fixed some broken models, and done a lot of texture creation and UV work to get them all functional. It's good to exercise some old computer graphics skills. As a bonus, EE also uses Lua as a scripting engine. The extra practice with Lua is a bonus for future projects. Nothing to show for it yet since it is still in dev, but it is cool to see all the ship models using the in-game engine.

So, in February of this year, I got diagnosed with Diabetes.
What has been a rollercoaster ride of fearing food (!Yup, I was afraid to eat!), ending up with fatigue and exhaustion (from not eating correctly), achieving my first ever swim of 1km!
Now I'm able to wear clothes from 18 months ago, and I all of this in the matter of 2 months (give or take).
So, life.. bring it on! I'm not ready, but I'll give it a good shot

So, in February of this year, I got diagnosed with Diabetes.
What has been a rollercoaster ride of fearing food (!Yup, I was afraid to eat!), ending up with fatigue and exhaustion (from not eating correctly), achieving my first ever swim of 1km!
Now I'm able to wear clothes from 18 months ago, and I all of this in the matter of 2 months (give or take).
So, life.. bring it on! I'm not ready, but I'll give it a good shot

Wrote a world generator tool for 7 Days to Die, as a replacement for the buildin RWG world generator.
It offers customization options for the maps and building placement, and uses a different aproach on generating the random terrain.
(7DtD uses layered noise functions, I use prepared terrain stamps, wich are combined in a random matter by a define ruleset.).

Ingame it looks pretty good. Shows that alternatives to noisefunctions work well for random generated world.
There is more artistic control over the output then.

Ooooooh. That is nice -- seeing these immediately makes me want to get down in there and start exploring.

Some quick (and maybe inaccurate) thoughts:

1. Do you use a "biome" concept? I see what look like broadleaf (deciduous) and conifers mixed together, which feels a little off (at least from a "how Earth works" perspective).

2. The road generation looks really nice.

3. Water edges might need some more variation -- hard to tell from just this one example, though.

4. I can see seams in the red "Western" terrain. Is there any kind of smoothing function?

5. Needs more rednecks.

A little disclaimer about what the world generator is doing, and what not:

It generates the landscape (terrain elevation, terrain details), what "biome" is used (here desert, forest, snow) , where the buildings are, where the lakes are, and the road.
The details on the map, such as what trees, stones and grass are generated, is up to the games ingame procedural generator. I could write all that, but its out of the my control in the end.

The biomes (i think Minecraft started that naming in gaming) are set in the games presets. I know that the details are not geologically nor geographically correct, such as the desert (like in Arizona) being on the same area as snow covered Alpine mountains. But there is a balance here between gameplay and immersion in a realistic environment. (There are specific resources in each biome that need to be accessible).
The game unfortunately only supports 16 bit hightmaps, wich are mapped to 0 to 256 meters. So Mountains are out of scale by about 1:10...

The transition between desert and "forest"/greenland could be smoother, but dithering the biomes textures would also look quite artificial. A limitation on the games side.

The roads are calculate by a custom path search, similar to Dijkstra. They account for the terrains elevation change, and connect the major cities in the game.
I wrote that quite swiftly, so its not very optimized. An A* version exists, but i could not figure out some bugs in it, making it not perform faster than the included pathfinding.

There is an adaptive smoothing, wich smoothes out small elevation changes, but keep steeper terrain more rough. Overall is looks better than having everything smoothed out.

Water is quite nitpicky in the game. Making the whole world flood if its spawned "over the edge". Unfortunately also a limitation of the game-engine.

Overall, its fun to write a tool that creates new worlds for people to play in... Especially having the option to generate you own personal world, that noone else saw before.